MIT's Aeolus To Prevent Accidental Data Leaks

To err is human and to prevent it is MIT's Aeolus system. Designed by the 2008 Turing Award (highest honor in Computer Science) winner, Prof. Barbara Liskov, Aeolus can effectively help in preventing the accidental, critical data leaks. Had Aeolus been invented in 2010 ; Blippy wouldn't have accidentally revealed the credit card numbers of it users.



Distributed computing architectures provide data and service integration; however the system also introduces problems related to information flow control because of the complexity of interactions between various service providers. Liskov believes that the key problem is the lack of an appropriate programming model to capture the expected information flow behaviors in larger deployments. Aeolus intends to be a programming methodology and enforcement platform for application developers allowing them to share their important data in a protected way. Aeolus prevents unauthorized release of sensitive information. Liskov's team has figured out a way to use hierarchy based approached to the information flow inspired from the medical data systems where the sensitive information is available to the primary physician but the admin staff only knows contact information and appointment times. Aeolus determines the hierarchical position of the user accessing the data and then takes care of the information flow within the system.

Further information about Prof. Liskov's work is available #-Link-Snipped-# & Information Flow for Secure Distributed Applications.